To: stribe30 who wrote (32743 ) 3/22/2001 3:25:07 PM From: Petz Read Replies (3) | Respond to of 275872 The PCWorld article says Morgan is coming soon: Morgan for the mobile market is already delivered to PC makers and is expected to be available in production volumes by the second quarter, the company says. Now, realizing that this latest AMD plan is subject to revision (cough) depending on market conditions, What on earth really is the MORGAN? A Palomino core with 64K L2? If so, how is it that AMD can make Palomini with 64K L2 and with 512K (or larger?) L2 available in the second quarter, but it'll be Q3 before the 256K L2 Palomino is ready? 1. The chipset explanation: Not enough Palomino-compatible chipsets for desktop, but enough for notebook and a few servers. AMD doesn't want to devalue the pipeline of KT133A boards? 2. The yield explanation: AMD is starting Pally production slow until the yield can be improved (either functional or bin-split). But this doesn't make sense because 512K Pally's would be lower yielding than 256K Pally's 3. The conservative manufacturing explanation: AMD is loathe to switch more than 10 to 20% of TBird production to a new core like they did with the ill-fated K6-2 "CXT" core. If they are increasing wafer starts now based on acceptable early experience, it will be almost Q3 before the increased production is completed. Meanwhile, there's only enough output to support notebook market and some SMP systems using 760MP. 4. The Palomino is being tweaked explanation: The Q2 Palomini will not support SSE because this was not ready yet. Notice that the markets where Q2 Palomini are targeted -- notebooks and servers -- do not really need SSE. Another "tweak" is possibly that the Pally core is being tweaked to be compatible with more already-existing chipsets. 1,3,4 kind of work together -- hopefully the Q3 version of Palomino will be more robust w.r.t. chipsets and include other features like SSE or SSE2. Petz